Fellowship at ACT connects dots for UNCSA alum

The actor, director and stage combat choreographer says he hopes to return to the
Pacific Northwest. But for now, Bodine is content putting into practice all that he
learned during his six-month stint with ACT — A Contemporary Theatre.

“If this opportunity for teaching hadn’t come through the way it did, I would have
stayed in Seattle,” says Bodine, an alumnus of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts who returned to campus this fall to teach for a year at the request of mentor and
Interim Associate Dean of Drama Dale Girard.

Bodine took advantage of wide-ranging opportunities at ACT, one of Seattle's largest
and most established playhouses with five theatres under one roof and an annual budget
of $6 million. He worked alongside director David Bennett on “The Legend of Georgia McBride.” Then he assisted acclaimed ACT Artistic Director John Langs on the world premiere
of "Alex & Aris,” a new play by Moby Pomerance about Alexander the Great and Aristotle.

“I got to watch this epic, ‘War and Peace’-scaled piece of theatre being built from
the ground up,” Bodine says. “We were getting dozens of pages thrown away each day
with new pages replaced in. It was amazing to watch the actors deal with that much
work and then completely do a 180 the next day. I learned more about my own acting
craft and how to work with actors as a director.”

The Kenan fellowship culminated in early August with a three-day run of “Fool for Love,” a twisted tale of incestuous love penned by American playwright and actor Sam Shepard.
As director, Bodine had the rare opportunity to reimagine the show, which played to
sold-out crowds on the heels of Shepard’s death at age 73.

“It was really kind of special to be able to honor Sam Shepard’s life by doing a work
right after his passing. It lent an energy to the performance of the actors,” Bodine
recalls.

“Rather than just doing a play by Sam Shepard because it is an American classic, I
learned more about the responsibility of a director to make the conversation more
active, more with the times. I tried to make the play more about the head games than
the physical attraction, because that always stood out in the play for me.”

“Fools for Love” also presented the biggest challenge Bodine would face during his
fellowship: casting. Langs stepped in and asked him to go back to the drawing board.

“If you do it right, casting is about 80 percent of the production,” Langs explains.
“There is a learning curve around the kind of actors you want in the room to make
a show successful.

“I asked him to put on the breaks and think about what diversity and inclusion and
representation meant to this project. I am an artistic director who believes that
what is represented on stage should really reflect the world around us.”

Langs, who is also an alumnus of UNCSA, considers it a privilege to mentor the future
leaders of theatre because he remembers the mentors who helped facilitate his professional
own journey.

“Gerald Freedman took me under his wings when he was artistic director of the Great Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland. I got to spend time with a gentlemen who had met the challenges of
theatre for decades,” Langs says of Freedman, the beloved Dean of the School of Drama
for two decades. “I can trace a direct line from my work assisting Gerald when he
was an artistic director to where I am sitting now as an artistic director. It is
huge to me.”

Langs was impressed by Bodine’s ability to network professionally while at ACT, which
he considers one of the most important aspects of the fellowship. Bodine would love
to return to Seattle one day because he felt so welcomed by the theatre community
there.

“I met people who I think would have invited me back in the door at the end of my
fellowship at ACT,” he says. “Anytime you go into a new market, it takes a lot of
knocking to get someone to open the door. At ACT, you come in and all the doors swing
wide.”

Changed and inspired by his experience in Seattle, Bodine now sees a master’s program
as a possibility in his future. The fellowship helped him to better understand the
skill sets he learned at UNCSA.

“I saw other working professionals applying those skill sets and people who weren’t,
and I started to understand what is good process in craft and what is ineffective
process in craft,” he explains.

“Now that I am back in a training environment as a teacher at UNCSA, I am watching
my colleagues teach the same material I was taught three years ago, and I am getting
so much more out of it now because I’ve seen it in the field. I’ve seen real-world
application of these techniques. That’s why I feel like a master’s is in the books
for me — I’ve learned how much I really don’t know.”